1st Year Exhibition April 2nd at Katzen 6-9

A NEW YEAR

I'd like to introduce the New First Year MFA's...

Michele Colburn
Temme Barkin-Leeds
Joo Yeon Ha
Adam Hager
Tyler Mullan
Camden Place
Samuel Scharf
Ben Tolman

Along Next Year With:
Kate Demong

Artist of the Week #7

Victoria Reeves Greising

www.VRGreising.com

Our daily interaction with fabric is physical. We learn to touch, wear, and feel fabric. We use fabric to protect and cover our bodies. We surround ourselves with colors, patterns and shapes to create comfort and familiarity. These societal habits facilitate meaningful and personal connections to fabric as object. By accessing the unique histories associated with particular pieces of clothing; textile patterns; folding, hanging, weaving, and stitching; the material I work with engages in many dialogues.

Thinking about how we, as humans, universally interact with fabric as a material, I deconstruct and reconstruct everyday clothing, sheets, curtains, and other previously used domestic fabrics to create unexpected forms and environments. Using repetitive processes of tearing, cutting, tying, and sewing, the fabric I manipulate is re-infused with an original form and function. I intentionally use fabric and clothing that has a history-- specifically collecting clothing, sheets, and scraps from people I know. Each article comes to me infused with a narrative, marks of its previous owner, and specific material characteristics-- holes, stains, dried out elastic. Through my process, I respond to the specificity of each piece in the construction of my forms.

My free standing pieces are figurational and engage the material concepts of wrapping, clothing, shape, character, and identity. My installations focus on the viewer as the figure creating a fantastical environment reminiscent of domesticated spaces—childhood forts, playrooms, etc. The fabric forms emerge from the ground and ceiling and layers of hand sewn color planes redefine architectural space. By combining these elements in a given space, my work activates memories and associations-- clothing as a signifier of comfort, identity, shelter, etc. The viewer relates to the creatures in shape, size and stature and is consumed in the womb like intimate spaces created by tightly crafted surfaces coming from the ceiling, walls, etc. The experience is visual, physical and ignites a recollection on space and material.

Artist of the Week #6

L. Kimberly Gillespie

lkimberlygillespie.com

I work in mixed media installations, using a combination of industrial materials (nails, wire, pins, latex paint), conventional art materials (acrylic paint, graphite, ink), and those more commonly associated with crafts (styrofoam balls and embroidery thread). Working methodically, I twist wires into creeping vines, cut and paint styrofoam balls to form growth-like clusters on the floor that eventually creep their way up walls and onto the ceiling. To create imagery in these environments I draw from memory, thought patterns, bodily systems and patterns in architecture and nature.

I began making work that reflects on memory after my mother died of Alzheimer’s four years ago. I witnessed her forget how to use common words, how to tie her shoes or dial a phone, and eventually, how to eat. In the same moments she was losing memory she spent increasing amounts of time, internally, in the places she did remember. In this era of excessive information and technology, where products are newer and better and faster than they were a week ago, she had little hope of keeping up as her short-term memory continued to slip away.

Drawing on the concepts of the gaps in memory as much as on memory itself, I look to specific objects for a point of visual departure. Tendril-like lines and strings of cellular shaped beads weave in and out of installations. Some of the imagery is reminiscent of amyloid plaques and tangles found in brain scan images of people with dementia. Some marks mimic the tangles of an Alzheimer’s brain and what I imagine to be the complexity of the path that information must now travel to reach the person suffering from the disease.

In addition to being about memory, my work is a visual response to the increasingly abundant information we are confronted with each day. I am interested in how we filter, compartmentalize and eventually lose the information we gather.

Group Pic with Robert Storr

(post crits and everyone is still smiling!)